It's a summer Monday morning at Chocolate World in Hershey,
Pennsylvania, and Craig Kirkland and Darryl Carr feel just
a little goofy. Each is wearing a T-shirt depicting a
roller coaster that travels at expressway speed and exerts
G-forces normally encountered only by fighter pilots. But
they're seated on Chocolate World's "simulated factory tour
ride," rolling at a walkabout pace through an elaborate
promotional exhibit that portrays the journey of cocoa
beans from jungle to Hershey's bar. The other cars are
filled with parents shepherding young children who are
wound up enough to suggest that one thing they don't need
is more chocolate.

Kirkland, a concert violist and 1994 graduate of
Peabody
Conservatory, looks bemused. Carr, currently
Peabody's stage manager, looks a bit grumpy. At the ride's
conclusion, they pick up complimentary candy bars and
stride purposefully into the adjacent Hersheypark, where
they confer. What to ride first? Wildcat, Roller Soaker, or
Lightning Racer? Comet, Sidewinder, or Trailblazer? Great
Bear, Wild Mouse, or sooperdooperLooper? All are roller
coasters, but the decision involves several considerations:
wood vs. steel, track car vs. inverted, speed and air time
vs. loops and Immelmans. Kirkland and Carr also ponder the
park's hilly geography, their present coordinates, and how
much life they have in their knees and backs, because they
aren't teen-agers anymore and it's going to be a long day.
They agree on sooperdooperLooper.

"This was the first looping coaster on the East Coast,"
Kirkland says. He checks with Carr. "We think 1977."

They're right about the date. These guys know that sort of
thing. They know sooperdooperLooper was designed by a
German named Anton Schwarzkopf. They know that Lightning
Racer is a GCI coaster, that Great Bear is a B&M coaster,
and they know why it matters. Name an amusement park
anywhere in the country, and they'll tell you which of its
coasters are knee busters (that's bad), which feature head
choppers (that's good), which are mere "tick rides," and
which are fast and smooth and make you feel like you're
floating weightless. They own coaster shirts, coaster shot
glasses, coaster key chains, coaster mugs, coaster
magazines, maybe even coaster coasters to place under their
coaster mugs. In their heads they maintain lists that rank
favorite coasters by category: best steel looping, best
steel non-looping, best wood (see Kirkland's Top 5 "Woodies"). They attend coaster
conventions, where they ride for hours nonstop, 20 or 30
rides in a row, sometimes through rain. They play a
computer game called Roller Coaster Tycoon that lets them
design the rides of their dreams; Carr admits he once lost
track of time and played the game all night.

It probably goes without saying at this point, but Craig
Kirkland and Darryl Carr are coaster freaks. The formal
term is "coaster enthusiasts," but that's too mild to
encompass this sort of passion. "I do other things,"
protests Kirkland. "I play basketball. I have a job." But
between them the two men have ridden several hundred roller
coasters, and during the next 14 days they plan to visit 15
amusement parks in five states to ride dozens more.
Starting here and now with Herr Schwarzkopf's
sooperdooperLooper.

Kirkland, left, got hooked on coasters just seven years
ago. Carr fell in love as a kid.

Day One

As I slide onto the seat next to Kirkland, I am 13 years
removed from my last ride on a roller coaster. But I'll be
damned if I'm going to hold on to the lap bar and look like
a wuss in front of these guys. Kirkland glances at my
outstretched arms as we near the summit of
sooperdooperLooper's lift hill. "All right!" he says
approvingly. "Hands up!" We clank to the ride's apogee,
crest, then hurtle toward earth. The people seated behind
us scream. The initial drop is modest, a mere 57 feet, but
not bad as the first adrenal rush of the day. That peculiar
floating-stomach sensation from a coaster's first plunge
makes me briefly close my eyes. Then we sail
shoes-over-noggin on the ride's one loop, pressed back in
our seats by basic physics. We swoop around some tight
turns and slide to a halt about a minute later. Kirkland
and Carr have notched the first ride of their 2002 summer
coaster tour. "The loop crushes you down pretty good,"
Kirkland says as we walk off, but otherwise he's not that
impressed. He promises bigger thrills to come.

The soundtrack of amusement parks is no longer the tootling
organ-pipe song of the merry-go-round. Now it's thumping
rock 'n' roll. At Hersheypark, the music comes from
speakers disguised as rocks. The rides range from the
familiar to the newfangled. Modern parks have bungee-cord
contraptions that whip people 150 feet up in the air, and
massive high-tech simulators that use film and lurching,
rolling chairs to create the illusion of flying through an
attack by space aliens. But they still have merry-go-rounds
and Ferris wheels and jerky little Wild Mouse coasters, and
you still have to be taller than Scooby-Doo (or, in
Hersheypark, above the level marked by a Hershey's bar) to
ride some of the main attractions. Teen-agers walk around
toting mammoth stuffed animals they've won at the
whack-a-mole booth. Kids clutch cotton candy and slurpees.
It's a hot day, already approaching 90, so people are
showing a lot of skin, much of it already pinking up, and a
lot of tattoos. Chubby teen-aged girls wear inadequate
shorts with lettering that says BOOTYLICIOUS across their
backsides.

Kirkland and Carr wear the uniform of the coaster
enthusiast: comfortable shoes, baggy shorts with cargo
pockets that button, and T-shirts bearing the images of
coasters from other parks. A coaster freak's souvenir shirt
must be from another park. Wearing a new, just-purchased
shirt would be like wearing denim to a formal dinner; it's
simply not done. Today, Carr has donned The Big Bad Wolf
(Busch Gardens, Williamsburg); Kirkland wears Montu (Busch
Gardens, Tampa Bay). An ex-girlfriend once accused him of
having a mistress. He thought she meant another woman. She
meant Montu.

Kirkland is 30 years old, easygoing and voluble, with very
red hair. While studying viola at Peabody he played on a
basketball team, and when everyone adopted nicknames he
became The Red Death; his e-mail username is "lemortrouge."
He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and like many musicians
cobbles together a living from an assortment of ensembles
and teaching posts. He plays with the Vermont Symphony, the
Goodspeed Opera House, the Connecticut Virtuosi chamber
ensemble, and has subbed with the Hartford Symphony. He
recently toured with blind tenor and international
heartthrob Andrea Bocelli, and learned that the tour
violist does not attract groupies. "I'm a poor musician who
likes to ride coasters and watch Star Wars," he
says. "I just reel in the girls."

Carr needles him. "You can't even get dates on the
Internet."

Kirkland has been serious about riding coasters for only
about seven years. "My first experience was awful," he
recalls. "I went to Disneyworld with my family when I was
quite young. We rode Space Mountain and I was terrified
beyond imagination." But in 1995, friends at a music
festival dragged him to Hersheypark, where he rode a few
coasters and got hooked. He began summer coaster tours in
1998. He's now a paid-up member of American Coaster
Enthusiasts (this makes him an ACEr, in the group's argot),
and on this tour he will bag his 200th coaster.

Carr traces his own addiction to his first ride as a kid.
He's lost count of how many coasters he's ridden, but he's
sure it's 300 to 400. He's 50, muscular, a
Philadelphia-born African American with a sardonic wit and
a penchant for amusement park gift shops. He was in the
audience at the original Woodstock music festival. He began
running stage crews in the sixth grade, and for a time was
stage manager for Baltimore's now-defunct Fish Market
entertainment area. "I got paid to make people party." At
Peabody he's been stage manager for 13 years. He's made
about eight coaster trips with Kirkland, "once Craig
admitted his addiction." His e-mail username is "coastnut."
Like Kirkland, he is afraid of heights.

Son of Beast, at Paramount's Kings Island in Ohio, is
the tallest, fastest woodie ever built.

Fresh off sooperdooperLooper, we stroll to the adjacent
Great Bear. Great Bear is an inverted coaster, which means
that instead of sitting in a train on a track, we're
clamped into seats that dangle from an overhead steel rail.
Inverteds are cool because you swoop around the turns like
a jet in a hard bank, but they rarely produce the
weightless, floating sensation called air time that coaster
freaks crave. This one sweeps us first into a helix, then
drops us 124 feet, turns us upside-down a few times, and
whips us around at 61 miles per hour. When we climb off,
Carr says, "I need some wood."

He means a wooden coaster. In the Linnaean taxonomy of
roller coasters, the species align in two major branches,
one of them wood, the other steel. For decades, all
coasters were trains that rode tracks mounted on soaring
wooden trestles, reflecting their ancestry of the
19th-century mine cars that trundled ore out of the ground.
Now many of the biggest, fastest coasters are all steel.
But aficionados like Carr still value good wood. So we head
for Lightning Racer, a twin-track wooden coaster that pits
a pair of trains against each other in a race. It's only 2
years old. "This will be a classic woodie in 30 years,"
Carr says. As we climb aboard, he shows me how to "pooch"
the lap bar. Coaster freaks hate tight restraints that nail
them to their seats. They want room to float, to get air
time. So they've learned to slouch and thrust out their
bellies when the ride operators come by to tighten the lap
bars. Once the ride starts, they sit up and enjoy precious
inches of freedom.

Lightning Racer is great: fast, smooth, and thrilling, with
the added fun of racing. The trains start side by side,
then diverge after the first plunge. We float over a pair
of fast hills -- good air time. After we clatter through a
tunnel (called a head chopper, because as you rush toward
it you're convinced you don't have enough clearance --
coaster freaks love 'em) the tracks braid, so the trains
swoop over and under each other at breakneck speed. When we
cross the finish line first we hoot derisively at the
losers on the other train, like the little boys we've
momentarily become.

As proper enthusiasts, Kirkland and Carr usually make a
point of climbing on every coaster at least once ("tick
rides" -- you ride once, just to tick them off your list),
including the kiddie coasters if the operators will let
them. So we make the rounds. Carr is delighted to find that
another woodie, Wildcat, which had been too rough the last
few years, now feels newly restored. "She's back," he says,
stroking the car after his first ride. "She's back." We
spend a few minutes observing Hersheypark's newest
attraction, Roller Soaker, a steel inverted. At several
points along its track riders get blasted by large volumes
of water. Kirkland and Carr don't fancy walking for hours
soaking wet and decide to pass. As darkness falls, we ride
Lightning Racer over and over. The first day's tally:

sooperdooperLooper: 1 ride

Great Bear: 2

Trailblazer: 1

Wild Mouse: 2

Wildcat: 2

Comet: 2

Lightning Racer: 11

Day Two

At Dorney Park, near Allentown, Pennsylvania, Carr (in
today's T-shirt: Islands of Adventure, Orlando) pauses in
the parking lot as we hear the sort of screams that emanate
only from a packed roller coaster. "Ah!" he says.
"Music!"

He and Kirkland (T-shirt: official blue American Coaster
Enthusiasts) are excited. Dorney has two great steel
coasters, Steel Force and Talon. Steel Force is what
coaster freaks call a hypercoaster: a mile-long monster
with a first drop of 205 feet, two tunnels, a 510-degree
helix, and a top speed of 75 mph. We can see it from the
lot -- massive, looming, waiting.

And silent. Near the park's entrances are signs that say,
STEEL FORCE CLOSED TODAY -- Sorry for the Inconvenience. I
can't repeat what Kirkland says when he sees this, because
some readers may not be as tall as Scooby-Doo, but he's
crushed. Carr is no happier.

To console themselves, they head straight for Talon.
Kirkland knows from a glance that this is a B&M coaster; he
points out the signature four-seat suspended cars, the
gauge of the track, the relative quiet of the ride as we
watch a train whoosh along the 3,000 feet of tubular steel.
Talon has a 120-foot drop, an S-curve, a spiral, a 98-foot
full loop, and other contortions that will turn us
upside-down four times. The dangling trains swoop so close
to the ground, their slipstreams have scoured the mulch,
exposing bare earth in two or three patches. B&M's
calculations for the design of Talon filled 4,602 pages. I
look at the ride now and hope they checked the figures.

We clamber aboard the front car, lower the restraining
"horse collars" that keep riders from vacating their seats,
and swing our legs as the coaster begins its long, clanking
climb up the lift hill. Signs below our feet taunt us as we
ascend: Getting Closer -- No Turning Back -- Almost There.
And at the top: Good Bye.

We sway drunkenly to the left as the train first swoops
right and then plummets toward the ground. My stomach seems
to float up into my chest cavity until I'm slammed back in
my seat by the first 360 loop. We exit the loop and scream
into an Immelman, named after the German fighter pilot who
invented the rolling loop in aerial combat during the First
World War. And here something happens. It's recorded this
way in my battered notebook: 1st ride, front car, I
blacked out on invert. I mean OUT.

As I experienced it, the world went dark and silent for a
moment, as if I'd stepped out of life. Then suddenly I was
back, still on the ride, still barreling along, scared but
jazzed on adrenaline. After we climb down, I ask Kirkland
if I might really have passed out. He says yes, especially
if the first ride of the day has a high G-force invert.
Something similar can happen to the pilots of fighter jets.
Whoa, I think. And then, Fighter pilots.
Cool. We immediately get in line to ride again.

Later, I learn that I'd probably experienced a syncopal
episode: a spontaneous loss of consciousness caused by
insufficient blood to the brain. Brains, blood, and
coasters are at the center of a current controversy that
has coaster freaks seething. Congressman Edward J. Markey
of Massachusetts has been on a two-year campaign for
legislation he has authored, the Amusement Park Ride Safety
Act. Markey wants the federal Consumer Product Safety
Commission (CPSC) to be granted jurisdiction over thrill
rides, and he wants a national limit on coaster G-forces.
He has published figures that purport 58 cases of inertial
brain trauma caused by amusement park rides (51 occurring
since 1990, when coasters began to get really big), with
eight fatalities. He's also stated that the fatality rate
for rides is higher than that for planes, buses, or
trains.

Coaster enthusiasts have been howling in protest, and there
is room for skepticism about Markey's numbers. Only 22 of
the cited incident reports came from the medical
literature; the other 36 are "unpublished cases," their
provenance not discussed in the congressman's press
releases. And the fatality rate Markey refers to is
actually "fatality rate per distance traveled," which takes
statistical advantage of the fact that coasters don't
travel very far. The International Association of Amusement
Parks and Attractions has mined data from the CPSC to point
out that in 2000, there were 6,594 injuries involving park
rides, with 125 requiring hospitalization. In the same
year, 45,604 people injured themselves using golf
equipment, and 627,164 were hurt on bicycles.

It does seem logical that as coasters get faster and more
strenuous, people with preexisting vascular or heart
conditions will be more vulnerable to injury, and a coaster
may be where they learn of their condition. Kirkland, like
most coaster freaks, shrugs off these concerns. Carr notes
that most serious accidents have been the result of riders
doing something stupid, like finding a way to subvert the
restraint system and stand up on a plunging coaster.
Consider it natural selection, he says.

We next self-select for Hercules, a Dorney Park woodie.
There's a kid in line wearing an ACE T-shirt. He looks
about 14 and is surrounded by three girls, one of whom
spots Kirkland's matching garment and says to the boy,
"Look, there's one of your people." The kid nods but
doesn't come over. Kirkland laughs. "He's probably afraid
we'll want to talk coasters for hours." Among ACErs, a pest
who latches on to you at a coaster event and bores you to
death with endless anecdotes is an "enthusiass."

Hercules has become known among coaster freaks as
"Hurt-Your-Knees" because its ride has become so rough.
Wood coasters flex and shift over time and if they're not
periodically retracked the cars jolt and bang riders
unmercifully. Today Hercules lives up to its reputation,
hammering us from start to finish. My head hurts when I
climb off.

All day, Steel Force dominates the horizon, taunting
Kirkland and Carr with its silence. No one will say why the
ride has been shut down, and there's no sign of it opening
today. We console ourselves with Talon. We accumulate eight
rides during the day, break for dinner outside the park,
then return and ride it straight to closing time, eight
more trips. The teen-agers operating the ride take note,
peg us as coaster freaks, and begin asking about big
coasters at other parks. We flirt with the girls, who are
happy for anything that relieves their boredom. When Talon
runs for the last time at 10 o'clock, we're on it.

The count for Day Two:

Wild Mouse: 1

Thunderhawk: 1

Lazer: 2

Hurt-Your-Knees: 1

Talon: 16 (1 syncopal episode)

Steel Force: 0 (!!)

Day Six

Four days later, I rejoin the tour at LeSourdsville Lake in
Ross, Ohio, near Cincinnati. LeSourdsville first opened in
1922 and once had a popular dance hall called Stardust
Gardens. The Cincinnati Enquirer notes that in 1974, 5,000
Teamsters attended a picnic at LeSourdsville and drank 44
barrels of beer. In 1990, fire destroyed Stardust Gardens,
and in 1999 the park closed. But last May it reopened, and
Kirkland and Carr added it to their list when they found
out.

When Le Mort Rouge and Coast Nut arrive, they're sporting
paper ID bracelets. Driving into southwestern Ohio the
night before, they'd realized that they would be spending
the night near another venerable Cincinnati-area park,
Coney Island. So they had raced off to snag a few rides
there before coming to LeSourdsville. They admit to being a
little tired. Since I left them in Pennsylvania, they've
ridden coasters at Idlewild and Kennywood, near Pittsburgh,
at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom, and at little Camden Park in
West Virginia ("First in Fun Since 1903!").

LeSourdsville is a different proposition from something
like Six Flags. Modern amusement megaparks are not cheap
for your average family. Hersheypark charges $27.95 per
person for a day pass and tacks on an additional $6 to park
your car; once inside, you can buy a good three-dollar
barbecue sandwich -- for six bucks. Tomorrow, Paramount
Kings Island will nail us $41.99 each to get in, plus $9 to
park. LeSourdsville admits us for a buck -- $1 -- with
rides an additional $1 per ride. The guy at the ticket
booth tells us that when all the park's attractions are up
and running, it will begin selling day passes for $15.95,
with parking thrown in. We watch as families stream through
LeSourdsville's gate. One little boy stops in his tracks to
look around, then says, "Wow! This is gonna be
great!"

The park is small, and Kirkland (today's shirt: the Phoenix
from Knoebel's Grove in Pennsylvania) and Carr (Montu)
don't mind the idea of a shorter day. Plus they appreciate
the ambience. Big parks draw big crowds and long lines,
bombard the customer with relentless marketing, and lack
the soul of a more modest park that has been around for a
century. Big parks do have the big coasters, but they can
also have what coaster freaks call TPM: Theme Park
Mentality. TPM, says Kirkland, is "when there are bizarre
and overzealous rules designed for the insurance needs of
the park rather than the enjoyment of patrons." For
enthusiasts, this means multiple restraint systems that
tightly clamp riders, headrests that obscure their view of
the track, and mid-course speed brakes that degrade the
coaster experience.

The Beast is still fast and long, but now it's way too
rough. Behind us, we hear Carr: "Ow. Ow. Ow ow ow.
Ow!"

Besides, LeSourdsville has the Screechin' Eagle, a historic
woodie first built for Moxahalia Park in Zanesville, Ohio,
in 1927. It was moved to LeSourdsville in 1938, and from
1999 until now it was what coaster freaks call SBNO --
standing but not operating. Enthusiasts know which SBNOs
are in danger of demolition. Sometimes they lead
preservation efforts. Screechin' Eagle was designed by John
Miller, a god among coaster freaks, who built rides in the
1920s. The Eagle's return is good news for the coaster
crowd and the main reason Kirkland and Carr are here.

An ultra-modern ride like Talon has a computerized control
panel housed in a glass booth. Screechin' Eagle has a
two-button control box set in a simple wooden stand, with a
fire extinguisher on the ground next to it. The Eagle's
cars have no headrests, and single lap bars that we easily
pooch. The ride is smooth for such an old coaster, and the
second half of the track provides great air time. Kirkland
and Carr love it. The trend now in coaster design, says
Kirkland, is "anything goes." Steel Dragon in Japan has a
315-foot first drop. Kings Dominion in Virginia has a
so-called "launch" coaster that reaches 80 miles per hour
in two seconds. There are stand-up coasters, coasters with
cars that spin, and coasters on which you "fly" lying
prone. Screechin' Eagle exemplifies a modest, venerable
ride that gets everything right. Says Carr, "You can make
it great without making it great big." After our first ride
on it, we shake Le Mort Rouge's hand. Screechin' Eagle is
his 200th coaster.

The day's tally:

Serpent: 1

Screechin' Eagle: 3

Day Seven

As far back as 1650, some Russians figured out that if you
built a 70-foot incline and slicked it with frozen water,
there'd be people nutty enough to slide down it for fun. A
Frenchman brought the idea to France, replaced the ice with
an inclined carriage track, and in 1804 created the first
roller coaster, which was called the Russian Mountains. In
the 1870s, people started riding the brakeless cars of
Pennsylvania's Mauch Chunk coal railway, for fun. That's
pretty daring, but those folks would pale at their first
glimpse of Son of Beast.

Son of Beast (SoB, inevitably) is at Paramount Kings
Island, a megapark near Mason, Ohio. It's the tallest,
fastest woodie ever built, and the first wooden coaster to
whip its riders through a full loop. You can see it from
anywhere in the park, its trellises looking like the
matchstick sculpture of a demented giant. Today is a
Sunday, which means we'll likely spend far more time in
line than on rides. So Kirkland and Carr head straight for
SoB, figuring we'll only want to endure one multihour wait
today.

But the queue proves remarkably short. Carr (today's shirt:
Six Flags Great Adventure) and Kirkland (Talon) look at me
and Marian, my wife, who has joined the Ohio portion of the
tour, and invoke the "virgin rule": If it's your first ride
on a coaster, you ride the front car. So we let them go
first, then climb into the front of the next train. As we
clamp ourselves in (I've decided not to pooch any coaster
more than 200 feet high -- Kirkland and Carr don't need to
know), I recall my syncopal episode and wonder if this is
really how I ought to start the day. Too late. We roll down
a nifty little 50-foot preliminary drop, then clank up a
seemingly endless 218-foot climb to SoB's first plunge. At
the front we crest, hang in the air for a
stomach-fluttering moment as the back end of the train tops
the hill, then roar down the tracks at nearly 80 miles per
hour, playthings of gravity. The clattering noise is
deafening and the speed is exhilarating, but the ride
punishes us with jolts and intense vibration. We roar down
two more drops, the lesser of which is 150 feet, do the
loop, and crash around for what feels like forever. When
it's over, I have to catch my breath and note the early
onset of a headache. We rejoin Coaster Guys at the exit.
They judge SoB a bit rough, but big and fast enough to
merit more attention.

Hang on! Vortex, at Kings Island.

Much smoother and more to my liking is an inverted steel
called Top Gun. We also ride Vortex, and the Racer, and a
remarkable steel looper named Flight of Fear, which is
entirely enclosed in a vast building. The only lights
inside are narrow-beam spotlights, so we can't really see
what's coming as the track twists and turns back on itself
in a demonic sort of origami. Every new turn and loop is a
surprise, which makes the ride all the more thrilling.

After a few hours, we board The Beast, SoB's forerunner and
at 7,400 feet still the world's longest coaster. Back when
my wife and I lived in Cincinnati, this was our favorite
ride. We loved the front car at night and could ride it
over and over. But we were younger then, and so was the
coaster. The Beast is still fast and long, but now it's way
too rough. Behind us on our one ride, we hear Carr's
commentary: "Ow. Ow. Ow ow ow. Ow!"

Throughout the day, he and Kirkland impart more of what
they know to Marian. She finally says, "You have all this
arcane knowledge. What can you do with it?"

To which Carr grins and responds, "Go on Web sites and tell
people their coaster choices suck."

At nightfall, Marian, a registered nurse and the sensible
member of our marriage, climbs on Top Gun for what she
swears will be her last ride. I sit beside her and we roar
around its twisting half-mile track. As the hour grows
late, the operators begin to let riders stay on for
multiple rides, so she says OK, one more. We whip around
the course again. Now it's closing time. The ops announce
last ride. She shakes her head and straps herself in one
final time. As we climb the first hill, the park's closing
fireworks burst in the black sky.

The day's tally is more extensive than we'd thought
possible in a big park on a Sunday:

Flight of Fear: 1

Racer: 1

The Beast: 1

Son of Beast: 2

Beastie: 1

Vortex: 1

Rugrats Runaway Reptar: 1

Scooby's Ghoster Coaster: 1

Adventure Express: 1

Top Gun: 5

We stroll out of the park amid a shambling, trudging legion
of tired, sunburnt parents and kids and teen-agers.
Kirkland and Carr learn of our successive rides on Top Gun
and tab us as future ACErs. As we shake hands and head our
separate ways to our cars, Kirkland says, "Remember -- you
have to steer this one."

Postscript

Through the course of their summer 2002 tour, Kirkland and
Carr rode 75 coasters. In a summary e-mail, Le Mort Rouge
sent along notes from five more parks. Their best
experience, though, was not at a world-famous megapark, but
at Holiday World, a small park located in -- seriously --
Santa Claus, Indiana: "Some of the ride ops were ACErs.
They let us ride with the lap bars down just one notch.
Free drinks all day for all guests. Best single day at a
park ever. I will go back every year if I have to walk
there."